News reports about serious problems with traveling door-to-door sales crews have been surfacing in the press for over 20 years.
By now nearly everyone has seen or heard some sort of bad news about these crews. Despite these reports, nothing has been done to regulate this industry in spite of two U. S. Congressional hearings and an outrageous, continuous outpouring of fresh stories of injuries and deaths of young salespeople.
We believe that part of the problem is the fragmented nature of the news stories, for these incidents occur randomly all over the United States because the jobs are travel jobs. There is, in fact, an order to these events–a pattern, a source. We are hereby correcting the problem of random information.
This site is dedicated to the archiving of news stories, convictions, and judgments in this sector of the door-to-door sales industry for perusal by the general public. We feel that the public has a right to know that these events have either happened in their state, or are likely to happen there in the future.
We feel that the public, by researching a particular interest on this website, will be able to readily see what the story is and what needs to be done. Most important, the public will be better able to protect its young people and keep them from falling prey to unscrupulous fly-by-night operators who make their living by trolling communities in search of a naive work force.
The news stories on this site will also demonstrate a disturbing trend in this industry: as the public has become better informed, the crew bosses have had more trouble recruiting through their usual medium of newspaper ads. They have turned to recruiting in malls, at teen events, on the street by pamphlet, and while selling door-to-door. Because hiring has become more difficult, more dangerous people are ending up on crews where they sometimes hurt innocent sales people as well as potential customers. This trend to increased violence will continue until something concrete is done.
We need new laws in place, both state and federal.
As you move through this information center we hope you will think of someone important who needs to know more about this. Feel free to forward any material to government or law enforcement or media and schools that you think will be beneficial. We only ask that you identify us as your source of the archived information.
If you have found this site because you have been injured while employed in this industry, or because there has been a news-worthy event in your community, please let us know and help us track the information down so that we may record it here.
It is a shameful thing that our government has chosen to ignore the plight of young, traveling door-to-door sales people for over two decades now.
It is beyond sadness for us, ‘a parents’ group whose children were victims, to think that if something had been done long ago when the first stories arose in the press, that our children, who were infants in their cribs at the time, would still be alive.